Social Skills as the Road to Character
Episode Stats
Summary
David Brooks discusses why our culture has lost an emphasis on moral formation, and why this loss has led to alienation and enemy. We then talk about the role each of us can play in repairing this fabric by developing concrete social skills.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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If you've ever wanted to develop your character, you've probably thought about strengthening
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virtues like courage, humility, and resolution. But my guests would say that practicing social
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skills is another way of increasing your moral strength and the moral strength of society as a
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whole. David Brooks is the author of numerous books, including his latest, How to Know a Person,
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The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. Today on the show, David discusses why our
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culture lost an emphasis on moral formation and why this loss has led to alienation and enemy.
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We then talk about the role each of us can play in repairing this fabric by developing concrete
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social skills, avenues to improve character that, unlike some virtues that are only called upon in
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a crisis, you can practice every day. David shares insights on how we can get better at giving
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people attention, asking good questions, and helping those who are going through a hard time.
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We also discuss how understanding different personality types and life stages can allow
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us to better understand other people. After the show's over, check out our show notes at
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aom.is slash know a person. All right, David Brooks, welcome back to the show.
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Oh, it's great to be back with you. So you got a new book out, How to Know a Person. And in this book,
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you take a deep dive to explore how to be the kind of person that can see and understand others deeply.
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Yeah, the impetus was basically we have a society that's rotting at the relational foundations. And so
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there are all sorts of super bad statistics out there. 54% of Americans say that no one knows them
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well. The number of people who say they have no close personal friends has gone up by four times in
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the last two decades. We've seen a rise of depression, rise of suicide. 45% of teenagers say
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they're persistently sad and hopeless. So there's just like this crisis of people feeling alone and
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feeling alienated. And this book is meant to be an exocet missile at that problem. It's meant to
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really introduce people to the skills they need so they can actually show up better for people.
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And there's one skill that's the core skill of all those skills, which is the ability to understand
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the people around you and make them feel seen, heard, and understood. And I wanted to get a lot
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better at doing that for the people around me. And I hope other people want to get better too.
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Yeah. So you argue in the book that there are two types of people in the world. There's
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illuminators and then there's diminishers. Let's talk about the diminishers first,
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because the illuminators, that's what the book's primarily about. What are diminishers like? What
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are these kinds of people like? These are people who are not curious about you. You know,
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I've noticed when I go to a party, sometimes I'll leave a party and I'll think, you know,
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that whole time nobody asked me a question. And I found that about 30% of people are question askers
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and the other 70% are perfectly fine. They're just not that curious about you. And so diminishers just
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lack that curiosity. But then worse, they stereotype, they label, they ignore, they've got their own
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egos in the way. So they're thinking about themselves and not about others. Or they're so stuck in their own
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viewpoint. They can't get a sense of your own viewpoint.
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Well, and you mentioned at the start, there's a lot of these statistics that we've been seeing
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about how this, like the social fabric is fraying in the West and particularly in the United States,
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increase in loneliness, increase in suicide, depression, et cetera. But then also you highlight
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other statistics we've been seeing in the past, I don't know, five years, maybe. And you wrote about
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this in the book, as well as in an article that you did for The Atlantic about just people behaving badly
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in public. What are some of the statistics you've seen there?
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Yeah, well, there's been a record rise in fights. We've obviously seen rising murder rates.
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I was at a restaurant in New York and the owner told me that he has to kick somebody out of his
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restaurant for entitled behavior about once a week. I'm friends with a woman who's a head nurse at a
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hospital. And she says her main problem is keeping staff, that the patients have become so abusive,
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a lot of nurses want to get out of the profession. And that's a problem caused by loneliness. When you
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feel that society doesn't recognize you, it feels like an injustice. And so you tend to want to lash
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out and you tend to want to attack. You feel under threat and you become vicious.
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Yeah, I've heard this thrown around. Sometimes I roll my eyes at it, but I think it's true. That
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idea that hurt people hurt people, it's probably what's going on.
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I mean, you know, loneliness is this weird thing because you feel under threat. And so you begin to
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get suspicious of the people around you and it cuts you off from the very thing you need most,
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which is some, you know, friendship and social connection. And if you look at our politics,
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I think you see the viciousness born out of a lot of people who feel
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Okay. So it's a vicious cycle going on. People are diminishers typically by nature because we're
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self-centered. We were ego-centered, but that being a diminisher is causing other people to be
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diminishers to you. And it just cycles and cycles downward.
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Yeah, exactly. That's well put. I wish I had put it that way.
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So in that, this chapter in this article in the Atlantic that I really enjoyed,
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you make the case that one of the reasons there's been an uptick in diminisher behavior
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is that we no longer have a shared moral education or shared idea of moral formation in the United
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States. And you talk about there's three elements to moral formation. What are those three elements?
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Yeah. So when you get morally educated, those three things are one, you learn ways to restrain
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your natural selfishness. Two, you find an ideal, some goal or some ideal that you try to orient your
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life around, something to give your life purpose, direction, and meaning. And then third, moral
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formation is just teaching people the skills of how to be considerate to each other in the complex
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circumstances of life, how to listen well to somebody, how to ask for and offer forgiveness,
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how to argue well without breaking a relationship, how to have a party where everybody feels included.
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And these are just basic social skills. You learn them the way you learn carpentry or tennis or
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whatever. And some days it feels like we built a society where we haven't taught people how to do
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Yeah. You have a great line in that article that I liked about this sociality is a moral virtue and that
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it's a skill. And you say this, you say, we learn most virtues the way we learn crafts through the
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repetition of many small habits and practices, all within a coherent moral culture, a community of
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common values whose members aspire to earn one another's respect. And that's very Aristotelian.
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I guess so. I'm happy to follow Aristotle. That's high company. I might as well learn from the best.
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And then in this article, you also talk about before World War II in the United States and in
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other Western countries, people were very intentional about moral formation. What did it look like before
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Yeah. Well, if you go all the way back to America's founders, our founders had a very realistic view
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of human nature. They thought people are wonderful in many ways and cooperative and generous, but they're
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also basically selfish and self-centered. And they had the thought that if we're going to make a
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democracy out of these people, we've got to train them better. We've got to give them training on how
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to be a good citizen, how to be a good neighbor, how to be a good friend. And so those morally
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formative institutions came from all parts of the political spectrum and all parts of the religious
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or non-religious spectrum. There were things like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts in schools. Schools
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used to think their main job was not to prepare you for the SAT or to get into college. Their main job was
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to teach character. A headmaster at one school said, we try to raise students who will be acceptable at
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a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. They wanted to train young people to be strong in a crisis.
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And so there were all these morally formative institutions of all varieties for the first 150
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years of our country. And then around 1945, 46, a new mode of thinking came into the culture,
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which was people are not basically sinful and self-centered. People are good. People are
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wonderful. It's institutions and authority that's the problem. And so a lot of the institutions like
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the Girl Scouts or the schools that used to be in the moral formation business, they got into the
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self-actualization business that all you got to do is get in touch with yourself because you're good.
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And so we stopped doing moral formation and you can see it. They have these things,
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Google n-grams that measure which words are used in common conversation. And usage of words like
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humility, honesty, courage, all the moral words, usage of those words went down like 60% over the
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next few decades. We just stopped talking about how do we make people morally better?
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What do you think caused that shift? I mean, it sounds like we went from a moral-based
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vocabulary to a therapeutic vocabulary, a psychological. Like what caused that shift?
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Yeah, I do think it was the basic sense that if you think human nature is good, that we're all
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wonderful inside, you don't need to form it. You just need to let it loose. And so people were
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encouraged to be self-indulgent. And then the second thing that happened is we went, I would say,
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from a more moralistic culture, as you say, to a therapeutic culture. But then we just went to a
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utilitarian culture. And so schools where I teach, which used to put creating, you know,
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here's a phrase I heard from Ted Lasso, which is a perfect description of moral formation.
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He was asked, what was his goals for his soccer team in his comedy series? And he said,
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my goal for us this year is just to make the men on this team better versions of themselves on and
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off the field. That's what moral formation is. Institutions that want to make the people in them
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better versions of themselves on and off the field. And we dropped that goal in a lot of our
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institutions, a lot of our schools. And now the goal is to get people into Harvard,
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to prepare people for professional success. And I think it's just fundamentally wrong that,
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you know, what's the most practical thing you can major in at a college, for example?
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Well, it's the humanities, because the humanities teach you about other people.
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And if you don't know about other people, you'll be miserable and you'll make them miserable.
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So we're very short-sighted in thinking we should teach you how to code,
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but we're not going to teach you how to understand human nature.
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Yeah. I think people don't appreciate oftentimes how radical of a shift that is. You know, for
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thousands of years, the purpose of education was to train the soul or order your desires in the
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appropriate way. It wasn't just about making a buck.
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Yeah. And now I think, you know, I have taught courses, my students call my courses therapy with
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Brooks, but they're trying to be, you know, moral formation classes. Like one of them was about
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making four big commitments. Most of us make a commitment to a philosophy or faith or to a family,
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to a community, and to a vocation. How do you choose those commitments and how do you live up to
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your commitments? And the course was very popular and these courses tend to be very popular,
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but they're few and far between at our universities. And, you know, some of my colleagues would say,
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I can't teach moral formation. I, I, my degree is in geology or my degree is in political science.
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I have no idea what moral formation is or how you would go about it. And we've become so
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professionalized that we've become demoralized. And my students, by the way, are, they're wonderful
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kids, but they're perfectly aware that they're morally inarticulate. They've not been given the
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tools to talk and think about this process of how do you become a better person?
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And as we talked about earlier, because we don't have this moral education in our culture,
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you know, this reinforcing web of social influences that help build character, this just leads to a
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downward cycle of disconnection and alienation because people are untrustworthy. So there's less
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social trust. And so, you know, we start retreating further into ourselves, but then when we do that,
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we feel lonely and unrecognized. And so we lash out and that just creates more of the perception
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that people can't be trusted. And so people disconnect from each other even more and just
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goes on and on. And you say that a big part of recovering a moral tenor in our society is learning
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to treat people better, to really see them and know them. So how do we start recovering that aspect
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of what I think you'd call, you know, like the road to character?
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The first step is just like the first encounter with a person. The first time you meet, we meet
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each other. We're unconsciously asking ourselves certain questions. Am I a priority for this person?
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Am I a person to them? And the answers to those questions will be communicated in the eyes before
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any words come out of anybody's mouth. It's how do you gaze at someone? And that first burst of
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attention is just super powerful. And so I tell the story in the book, I was out, I was in Waco,
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Texas at a diner having breakfast with a woman named LaRue Dorsey, who was this 93 year old lady
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who used to be a teacher. And she presented herself to me as a strict disciplinarian. And I was a little
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intimidated by her. She said to me, you know, I love my students enough to discipline them.
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And then into the diner walks a mutual friend of ours named Jimmy Durrell, who's a pastor.
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He pastors the homeless. And he walks up to us and he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders
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and he shakes her way harder than he should shake a 93 year old. And he says to her, Mrs. Dorsey,
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Mrs. Dorsey, you're the best. You're the best. I love you. I love you. And that stern disciplinarian I
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had been talking to turned instantly into a bright eye shining nine year old girl. And that shows the
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power of a gaze to turn somebody into a different version of themselves. And the most powerful point
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I'm trying to make here is that Jimmy is a pastor. And so when he meets anybody, absolutely anybody,
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he thinks he's met someone made in the image of God. He thinks he's looking into the face of God.
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He's trying to see them with the eyes Jesus would use to see them eyes with compassion and love.
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And you can be an atheist, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, Buddhist, whatever. The ability to approach
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everybody you meet with that level of reverence and respect is an absolute precondition for knowing
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them well. And that's what's sacred to me, the sacredness of each individual human being we
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encounter. All right. So Jimmy, this pastor, he's an illuminator, right? He's the guided guy that when
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you're around him, you just, you feel noticed, you feel seen, and you feel better being with that person.
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Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I've, I have a friend named Mac. He's probably like 75.
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You walk into a coffee shop with him. First meeting, everyone becomes friends with him
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because he's so outward. Second meeting, they think he's their best friend. And the third meeting,
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they ask him to officiate his wedding. And like, he's just like, he's, his attention is on you.
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And it's just very powerful. I tell the story in a book of another illuminator and he worked at Bell
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Labs. And they were, Bell Labs was this legendary research facility. And they noticed that some of
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the researchers were way more innovative and productive than others. And they were asking, you
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know, what makes some of these people so good and not better than the others? And it had nothing
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to do with their IQ level, their education level. It turned out the most innovative researchers were
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in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with this electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist.
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And he would get inside their head. He'd pour his attention into them and help them think through
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their problems and help them make progress. And so by getting into other people's heads,
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Harry Nyquist was an illuminator. He made them better.
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Have you had any illuminators in your life that have had a big impact on you?
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Yeah, I would say that Guy Mack has had a big impact. You know, I, it's sometimes I would say
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in my own life, when I felt really seen, sometimes it hasn't always been pleasant. I have a memory
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going way back to 11th grade English. And I had made some smart alecky remark. And my teacher,
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Mrs. Doosnap, barks at me in front of the whole class. David, you're being a smart ass. You're trying
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to get by on glibness, stop it. And on the one hand, I was kind of humiliated because she called
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me out in front of the whole class. But on the other hand, I thought, wow, she really knows me.
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And she had named for me something which was a real problem, especially for me in high school,
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just being smart ass. And it gave me something to work on. So even though it wasn't a sweet
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Yeah, she saw you. And I really love this idea. And you weave it through throughout the entire book,
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this idea that attention, paying attention to people is a moral act. And I think there's,
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you know, you talk about Simone Weiss. That was her big philosophical idea. Attention is a moral act.
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Yeah, there were a couple women from Jewish families in World War II who really emphasized
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this. Simone Weiss said that attention is the ultimate act of generosity, paying attention to
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one another. There was another woman, a Jewish woman in Amsterdam when the Nazis invaded.
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And she just, she was sort of a mess when they invaded, very self-absorbed and self-centered.
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But as the horror of the Holocaust became clear to everybody, she became more self-sacrificial.
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And her biographer said of her, she grew by looking. She would study people, the bend of their neck,
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the anxiety in their voice. And she refused to be calloused over by the brutality of the time she was
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living in. And she went to work as a volunteer in one of the transit camps. And people described her
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as transcendent, glowing, always on the lookout for others, always trying to be open-hearted toward
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others, always trying to serve others. And they describe her as just this saintly figure. And what
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really strikes me about that is you can be open-hearted even in brutal times. And when you're
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just this defiant kind of humanist, especially brave when politics are rough, when you're stuck
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in a region at war and you can not lose your humanity, that's a true accomplishment. And they
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did it by just noticing the people around them. Okay. Let's talk about some things that you've
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found to help you become more of an illuminator type. So it requires paying attention to others,
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and that requires developing these concrete social skills that you've talked about.
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And one of the skills of an illuminator is this idea that you need to have the ability to accompany
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another person. What does it mean to accompany someone?
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Yeah, well, most of life is just hanging out. We're not having deep conversations with each other.
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But when you're accompanying, I obviously get it from music, where the pianist accompanies the singer.
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The pianist is there paying attention to the singer, trying to make her shine. And it's sort of an
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other-centered way of being. And so sometimes when we're accompanying each other, we're just playing,
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like we're playing basketball. And play is an amazingly powerful way to get to know another
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person because people tend to be at their most natural when they're playing basketball or playing
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pickleball or just playing. Like when my son, my youngest son was an infant, he would wake up at
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four in the morning. And I would have to wake up with him. And I would play with him for about five
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hours before I went off to work. And when he was like 16 months, I remember he was playing on my
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chest. And I remember thinking, you know, I know him best better than I've known anybody. And he
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probably knows me best better than anybody has ever known me because I've been so open playing with
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him. And we had never exchanged a word at that point because he couldn't talk. But through the looks
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and interactions of play, you really can get to know someone very well. And then the other part
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of accompaniment is just being present, just showing up for people in hard times. And one of the stories
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I tell in the book is about a former student of mine who's lost her dad to pancreatic cancer.
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And she had always discussed with him that he would miss her big life events. Then shortly after
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college graduation, she was invited to be a bridesmaid at a friend's wedding. And she was
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at the wedding and she was watching the interaction between the proud father and his daughter as she
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was getting married. And of course she was moved, but also tender because of the loss of her own dad.
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And during the reception, they had the father-daughter dance. And she said, you know, I think I'm just
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going to step into the restroom, have a cry. And she comes out of the restroom and everybody at her
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table and the adjacent table had gotten up and they were just standing there outside the bathroom.
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And as she exited, each of them, nobody said anything. They each just gave her a hug
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and went back to their tables. And she said, I didn't need them to linger around and offer false
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grief. They gave me exactly what I wanted. And so that's a group of people who really knew what
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she needed. They knew her and they saw her. We're going to take a quick break for a word
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from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So being with someone, accompanying someone,
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it's a passive active activity. You're along for the ride, but you're also engaged with it at the
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same time. One way you can be engaged when you're accompanying someone is listening,
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asking questions. And you do this. I love what you do in the books. You offer some concrete advice
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on questions you can ask to get to know someone better. So what are some really great questions
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you found to learn how to understand people better? Well, I think one thing I learned was we need to be
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a little more ambitious in our questions. We need to ask big questions. And so kids are phenomenal at
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asking questions. One of my favorite stories in the book concerns a friend of mine named Naomi Way,
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who is teaching eighth grade boys how to ask questions so they could become student journalists.
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And the first day of class, she sits in the front of the class and said, OK, ask me anything. I'll
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answer it. So the first question from a boy was, are you married? The answer was no. And the second
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question was, are you divorced? The answer was yes. Third question was, do you still love him?
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And immediately she has a sharp intake of breath. And she says, yes. And they say, well,
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does he know? Do your kids know? And so kids are just phenomenal at those blunt questions.
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But as we get older, we get a little shy and we don't ask. And so, you know, I start by asking
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people questions like, where are you from? I want to know where their childhood was. I've traveled a
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lot in the country, so there's a good chance I've been to at least near where they're from.
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Or where'd you get your name? That's something that gets people talking about their family or
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maybe their ethnic heritage. And then as you really get to know someone, you can have playful
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questions. Like I once was in a group and I asked, what's the most fun, unimportant thing about you?
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And I learned that this academic, who I find very imposing, loves trashy reality TV. That's an
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unimportant thing about him. That's kind of fun. And then as you really get to know someone,
00:23:18.860
the good questions lift them above their daily experience and get them to think about their own
00:23:24.860
life in a new way and explore it with you. So those are questions like, what crossroads are you
00:23:29.860
at? Most of us are in one life transition or another in life. So what crossroads are you at?
00:23:35.480
Or what's the commitment you've made that you no longer believe in? Or what forgiveness are you
00:23:41.040
withholding? And so those are questions that get people to step back and have to think about their
00:23:45.620
life in a new way. And they find it very rewarding to answer those questions because it allows them to
00:23:51.140
show themselves. And it's tremendously fun to be the one hearing them because every life is more
00:23:56.440
fantastic and amazing than you think. We only see 20% of each other. And if we get to see 50%,
00:24:02.120
we're astounded by the things that are going on down in each person.
00:24:06.820
Okay. So you don't want to start off these big questions right away with someone, a stranger,
00:24:10.220
like you don't discount the importance of small talk. They're friendly noises we make to
00:24:14.060
get comfortable with people. But you say you can ask those questions about your name,
00:24:18.020
where you're from, and then lead up to these big ones. Some of my favorite ones,
00:24:21.600
we talk about you had dinner with a political scientist and he was 80 years old. I love this
00:24:26.660
question he asked. He says, I'm 80. What should I do with the rest of my life?
00:24:30.640
Yeah, it was such a big question. But we had a great conversation around it. It's like, first,
00:24:36.440
what are his interests? But second, how should you age? How should you approach the final years of
00:24:42.020
energy before death? It was just like a set of big questions. And I will tell you, I've learned
00:24:47.100
this as a journalist, and I've learned it from talking to conversation experts. How often when
00:24:51.640
you ask a question, does somebody say, none of your damn business? The answer is never, almost never.
00:24:57.820
People are dying to tell their story. For this book, I interviewed a guy named Dan McAdams,
00:25:03.000
who works at Northwestern, and he studies how people tell their life story. And he calls people in,
00:25:08.600
asks them to describe their high points of life, the low points, the turning points.
00:25:13.740
And then after a few hours, he says, thank you. And he hands them a check to compensate them for
00:25:18.900
their time. A lot of the people push back the check and say, I don't want to take money for this.
00:25:23.800
This has been one of the best afternoons of my life. No one has ever asked me these questions.
00:25:31.320
Yeah. And you're helping that person. What these questions do is you're helping these people
00:25:35.160
craft the story of their life. And they've never probably been asked to tell their story.
00:25:40.780
And with these questions, you're allowing them to do that.
00:25:43.780
Yeah. And I guess I'd say that most people don't sit down and say, what's the story of my life? It's
00:25:47.420
only when we're asked that we have to come up with it. And as we're listening to the stories,
00:25:51.760
you want to listen first, what's the role the person puts themselves? How do they see themselves?
00:25:56.460
I guess for me, I'd be the teacher. That's the role I assign myself in life. And other people
00:26:03.440
can be the healer. Other people are the reconciler. Other people are builders. And there's usually a
00:26:09.960
social role we give ourselves. And then the other thing that's interesting to listen for in listening
00:26:14.440
to people's stories, what's the plot here? People pick up a size and shape of a plot from the culture
00:26:21.320
around. And so some people may tell their life story as a rags to riches story. I started out the
00:26:26.400
bottom. I made it to the top. Some people as an overcoming the monster story. I had an abusive
00:26:32.420
parent or I had to struggle with alcohol and I had to overcome the monster. And a lot of people,
00:26:37.260
and I think I'm in this camp, tell redemption stories that I was cruising along in life.
00:26:43.680
Something bad happened. I came back better. That's redemption. That's a redemption story.
00:26:49.100
And so when you hear the plot of some of these stories, you learn a lot about them by what plot
00:26:55.020
they assign to their lives. So this idea of paying attention to people, ask good questions as part of
00:27:01.280
it, but then you have to listen. And you have to listen in a way so the person sees that you're
00:27:06.060
actually listening. Anything that you've come across that has helped you become a better listener?
00:27:09.580
Yeah, I share a whole bunch of tips on how to be a better conversationalist. One of them is treat
00:27:16.580
attention as an on-off switch, not a dimmer. Make it 100% paying attention, not 60%. Another is
00:27:23.380
be a loud listener. You should be listening so actively, you burn calories. And so I have a buddy
00:27:29.880
named Andy Crouch who's, when you're talking to him, he's like a congregation in one of those
00:27:35.160
Pentecostal churches. He's going, uh-huh. Yep. Yep. Preach. Amen. Amen. Amen. I just love talking
00:27:40.920
to that guy. Another is don't fear the pause. If I say something in our conversation, at what point
00:27:48.960
do you stop listening so you can think of what you're going to say? We miss like 40% of each
00:27:53.960
other's comments because we shift to, well, what am I going to say to this? And so if I let you talk out
00:27:58.860
the whole thing you want to say, then I pause for a couple seconds. Maybe I hold up my hand to show
00:28:04.100
that I'm really digesting what you just said. And then I answer. And that's a way of really hearing
00:28:08.880
what you're saying and really honoring what you're saying. You also talk about how you can help someone
00:28:13.500
who's going through a hard time. I think this is an area where people have friends and family members
00:28:19.360
who are going through a hard time. It could be job loss, a loved one died, it could be depression,
00:28:25.240
alcoholism. And they see these people suffering, but they don't know what to do. They want to help
00:28:30.980
and be with that person, but they don't know what to do. So they just don't do anything,
00:28:35.120
which is probably the worst thing you could do. And I think the reason why people don't know is
00:28:39.500
going back to what we were talking about earlier, you're just not taught this stuff anymore. So what
00:28:44.280
can people do to help someone going through a hard time? Yeah, well, it's two different kinds of hard
00:28:49.500
times. First is depression. As I describe in the book, one of my oldest friends got hit with a real
00:28:55.000
severe case of depression. And I did it wrong for the first year or two. The first, I would try to
00:29:03.480
offer him ideas on what he could do to get out of depression. Like, why don't you go to Vietnam and
00:29:08.840
help people who are poor? That'll be rewarding. You've done it before. You found it so rewarding.
00:29:13.580
Why don't you do that again? And I learned that if you're trying to offer somebody who's depressed
00:29:17.980
ideas about how to get out of depression, you're really, all you're doing is saying,
00:29:22.400
you just don't get it. Because it's not ideas they're lacking when they're depressed.
00:29:27.600
The second mistake I made was positive reframing, trying to remind my friend of all the good things
00:29:33.160
he had in his life, his great career, his great wife, his great kids. And that positive reframing
00:29:38.140
just makes things worse too. Because it's like telling the person that he's not enjoying the
00:29:42.720
things he should palpably be enjoying. And so he makes him feel worse. And I learned in this sort of
00:29:48.460
thing, all you can do is show, I'm still here. I'm not going away. I'll never go away. This is
00:29:54.840
unconditional. I'm sticking around as your friend. And then you can say, listen, I admire you for your
00:30:00.900
strength because you're still here. And you have faced a lot of pain, but you're still here. And I
00:30:07.080
think those are some of the things you can say to someone who's depressed. For someone who's suffering
00:30:11.000
grief, I think the best thing, you know, I have a friend who lost a daughter to an accident in
00:30:17.800
Afghanistan, and then nearly lost another daughter to a bike accident in DC. And she told me, you know,
00:30:24.920
sometimes people don't know if they should mention Anna, the daughter who died, because that might be
00:30:29.540
reminding me of a bad subject. But they should know that Anna is always on my mind. And therefore, if you
00:30:35.900
mention her, you give me the chance to talk about her if I want to, or to not talk about her if I
00:30:41.500
don't, but you're giving me the chance. And then she said to me, as she was nursing her younger daughter
00:30:46.840
back to health, she said, do you want to know what the best thing anybody ever did for us in this
00:30:51.300
period of recuperation? Somebody went to the bathroom in our house on a visit and noticed we
00:30:57.420
didn't have a shower mat in the shower. And so they went out to Target, they bought a shower mat,
00:31:02.700
they put it in the shower, and they didn't say anything, they just did it. And she said,
00:31:07.040
that was the kind of practical help that just helped me exactly where I needed help,
00:31:12.260
just on the daily practicalities of life as my daughter and I are going through this hard time.
00:31:17.840
Yeah, I think that's one of the benefits going back to, you know, this idea we had a community
00:31:23.340
of moral formation helped you learn how to do these things. Like churches, I think it's one of the
00:31:28.540
benefits of churches is that you had these rituals you'd go through when someone passed away. So in
00:31:34.240
my church, if someone dies, the members of the church, they're going to cook the family lots of
00:31:38.220
dinners and casseroles. They don't have to worry about that. They're going to put on the funeral
00:31:41.440
for the person. There's like these things you just do that people have done for generations that you
00:31:45.740
just, you do over and over again, no matter what. And now when people are going to church less,
00:31:51.200
they don't have those built-in rituals. So they don't, they have a harder time figuring out,
00:31:54.700
well, what should I do to help this person out? Yeah, no, I agree completely. Like in the Jewish
00:31:58.760
tradition, it's called sitting shiva. And so if you lose a husband, the obvious form of therapy is
00:32:05.220
not, well, you need to throw a party every night for the next week. But that's sort of what it can
00:32:10.120
be like in the Jewish community where the person who's grieving has a lot to do. They got to clean
00:32:15.400
up the house. They got to arrange the food and, and they have people around them every night for a week.
00:32:20.600
And it's actually a brilliant form of therapy because it, it surrounds you with community
00:32:25.180
and it surrounds you with a lot of casseroles and stuff like that. But it gives you something to do
00:32:30.640
and it gives you a way to process what you're going through. And people now, if we don't go to church or
00:32:36.900
synagogue or mosque, we may have friends, but we're not enmeshed in the institutions that leap up
00:32:41.740
during hard times. And so just as you say, a church or a synagogue or a mosque, that community,
00:32:47.280
they know exactly what to do when there's grief, your loose collection of friends are going to be
00:32:51.980
a lot less reliable. Okay. So helping someone going through a hard time, whether it's depression
00:32:56.820
or grief, I think the big takeaway there is just be with them, accompany them. And maybe you don't
00:33:01.280
have to say anything, just be there with them and find ways you can help them. That's it. And
00:33:06.720
there don't worry about saying the wrong thing. I think a lot of people, that's another thing they
00:33:11.440
freak out about. They're going to say the wrong thing. I think people will just appreciate that
00:33:15.960
you are there with them. Yeah. And I learned that there are two sorts of people in a crisis.
00:33:21.240
They're firemen and builders. And there are some people who show up right at the moment when you've
00:33:26.300
lost a spouse or a kid or whatever, and they're there in the beginning. And then there's another
00:33:31.660
group of people who they show up later on, but they're there for the long-term process,
00:33:37.900
which you have to go through to rebuild your mind, rebuild the models of your mind. So you
00:33:42.260
can now cope with what life is like without that person. And these tend to be two different
00:33:47.720
sorts of people. And the other thing that a lot of people I've heard say is that when you lose,
00:33:53.880
when you say you lose a kid, some of the people you think are going to show up for you, who you're
00:33:58.640
really close to, do not show up for you. And some of the people you never expected, they travel across
00:34:04.600
the country and they show up. And it's, it goes back to that illuminator, diminisher dualism that
00:34:10.400
some people are just show or uppers and they may not be your best friend, but when they hear about
00:34:15.720
a crisis, suddenly they're there and they've parked in front of your house and they're, they're,
00:34:20.660
they're red, ready to do any, whatever you want them to do. And that's a good trait to be a show or
00:34:25.460
upper. Yeah. That idea of the distinction between firemen and builders. We, I saw this firsthand,
00:34:31.060
my wife and I, one of our good, very good friends, he lost his wife in a tragic skiing accident
00:34:37.060
several years ago. So he was a widower, had five kids at the time. They're all under the age of
00:34:41.820
11, I think. And so right away, you know, people circled the wagons around him and helped him out.
00:34:47.960
But then he talked about after a while, people just stopped because people have their lives to live.
00:34:52.740
He understood it, but my wife and I made it a priority just to, to stay connected with him,
00:34:58.720
even though he's, you know, he lives in another state because yeah, your life, you have to rebuild the
00:35:03.560
life completely after that. And you need other people to help you during that process.
00:35:09.140
Yeah. I mean, you even need to rebuild your mind because your mind is, we understand reality by
00:35:14.700
building models of reality. And so in that guy's models, his wife was right there. And if he had
00:35:20.780
something funny to share, he would, she would be there. And suddenly she's not there anymore.
00:35:25.960
And sort of the fibers of his mind are reaching out for her, even though she's not there. And it takes
00:35:31.100
like years for the models to get modernized. So she's there as a memory, but not as a living
00:35:38.280
presence. Okay. So we talked about paying attention and you can do that just by being
00:35:42.520
with someone, asking good questions, really listening. You also talk about, you have this
00:35:47.180
chapter on personality and understanding the science of personality. How can understanding
00:35:51.680
personality help you relate better with others? Well, to know other people, you have to know about
00:35:58.080
human nature. You know, just as a geologist can look at a rock face and see more than an amateur,
00:36:04.000
or just as a sommelier can taste more at a wine, it really helps to have domain knowledge about human
00:36:09.860
beings. And one of the things, you know, the easiest to spot thing is the personality type.
00:36:15.820
And our conversation of personality types is very screwed up in this country. I sometimes ask groups of
00:36:21.640
people, how many of you know about Myers-Briggs? And almost every hand of the room goes up. People
00:36:27.660
know about Myers-Briggs. And then I say, how many of you know about the big five personality traits?
00:36:33.000
And maybe 10 or 20% know. And what's wrong with that is that Myers-Briggs has no basis in
00:36:38.440
scientific research. You take the test multiple times, you get multiple diagnoses of who you are.
00:36:45.260
It is not predictive of how anybody's going to do in a job or in a marriage or anywhere else.
00:36:49.440
And the categories are wrong in Myers-Briggs. Like it says that some people are thinking people and
00:36:53.860
some people are feeling people. But in fact, people who are good at thinking are also good
00:36:57.520
at feeling. So it gets human nature wrong. But there's masses of research in what's known as
00:37:03.960
the big five personality traits. And those are extroversion, which is drawn to positive emotions,
00:37:10.940
conscientiousness, high impulse control, agreeableness, your ability to like other people,
00:37:16.640
openness to new experience, whether you're adventurous or not. And then neuroticism. Do
00:37:22.400
you respond to negative emotions? And if I know that you're high in conscientiousness, I'm probably
00:37:27.120
going to expect you to be disciplined and persevering and organized. I'm going to be expecting you're
00:37:32.200
going to be doing pretty well at school and probably pretty well in a company because you really have a lot
00:37:36.800
of self-control. On the other hand, if my kid is high in neuroticism, which is very sensitive to
00:37:43.400
negative emotions like fear or anger, then my kid is going to hear my correction, which I think is a
00:37:50.040
gentle correction. He's going to hear that as shouting. And so I need to parent a kid who's
00:37:56.300
neurotic in a way that is a little gentler. And so he doesn't feel perpetually under assault. So it's
00:38:02.700
super important that I know his personality traits. And we can do that mostly by observing each other.
00:38:08.120
If we hang around each other, we know who's extroverted or not. We know who's agreeable or
00:38:13.000
not. And it just helps you see what kind of person that is, if you can attach sort of a tendency of
00:38:21.640
All right. It'll help you relate better to them. You also have this chapter on life stages. And this
00:38:27.080
is really interesting because as I was reading this book, I was writing an article about life stages,
00:38:32.020
paradigms for different cultures and different times in human history.
00:38:34.760
Tell us about this. How can understanding life stages or life cycles help us be able to
00:38:43.840
Yeah. So we have different tasks that we go through in life and they happen at different times. And
00:38:49.640
our minds are reshaped so we can complete that life task. So when you're a boy or a girl,
00:38:55.780
your primary life task is to show you can compete and you can be effective. And so at school,
00:39:01.840
there's a lot of competitive games as people are competing to show, yes, I can be effective
00:39:06.220
and at school. And so you're kind of self-absorbed as a kid and you're just trying to show you can do
00:39:12.400
things. And then you get to adolescence and you're in a more interpersonal phase. You're trying to find
00:39:18.100
out who you are and that's shaped by what other people say about you. So you become, your main job
00:39:24.860
there is to make friends and be popular among friends. And so in that first stage of that first
00:39:30.700
task of life, you're going to be a little self-centered and self-enclosed. And then the
00:39:35.660
next task in adolescence, you're going to be super sensitive to social slights. And so that's just a
00:39:41.940
very different mentality. So if you can see what task somebody's in the middle of, you'll have a good
00:39:47.020
deal of idea of how their mind works. And so for example, I'm kind of caught between two life tasks.
00:39:53.520
The one task, which is what most middle-aged people are in the middle of, is career consolidation.
00:39:59.740
How do I become a success at work? But then you hit a certain age and that becomes a little
00:40:04.620
unsatisfying and you move on to the next task, which is generativity. How do I give back?
00:40:10.520
And so I'm in this weird transition moment where I hope I'm trying to give back to society,
00:40:15.940
but I still have the normal anxieties of anybody in career. And so like a couple of years ago,
00:40:20.720
I wrote a book about how to be a good member of community, how to be a generous human being.
00:40:25.560
And I wrote this noble book about how you shouldn't care about career success.
00:40:29.480
And yet when the book came out, I was like looking at my Amazon ranking every hour. And so
00:40:33.400
I clearly had not made the transition. I was still obsessed with career. And I sort of think I'm in
00:40:38.500
the middle of that. So if you can ask yourself or ask the other person, what's your main life task
00:40:44.260
right now, you'll be able to learn a lot about how they see the world, how they structure their
00:40:49.020
days, how they prioritize their desires. Yeah. One of the ideas from the road to character that
00:40:54.620
I think about a lot that you wrote about was this idea of two atoms. So we're talking about Adam,
00:40:59.160
like the first human, and there's Adam one and Adam two. And this comes from the Jewish tradition
00:41:04.180
that there's these two types of atoms. And Adam one is our ambitious career oriented self.
00:41:08.940
And then Adam two is when we shift to generativity, like helping other people thinking of we.
00:41:14.900
And I've seen that in my own life. And I also see it in the lives of, you know,
00:41:18.880
teenage boys that I mentor. I know when I interact with my, these teenage boys at church and in flag
00:41:24.100
football, like they're totally, they're getting into Adam one phase. Like they, what they want to
00:41:28.420
know is like, how can they be successful? How can they get stronger? How can they get better?
00:41:32.860
What can they do to attract members of the opposite sex? That's their focus. And so like,
00:41:37.180
I understand that there's nothing wrong with that. That's the phase of life that they're in.
00:41:41.080
They're trying to build a life for themselves. And so I try to orient a lot of the things I talk
00:41:45.640
about towards that. Yeah. I think understanding those life stages can help you connect better
00:41:49.900
and understand people better. Yeah. And if some people, like if you have somebody who's in the
00:41:54.480
interpersonal phase and she marries someone who's still in that first stage of trying to prove
00:42:00.480
themselves, she's going to ask him to give more emotional connection than he's capable of giving.
00:42:07.180
Cause he, his mind just hasn't entered the task where a deep introspection or deep connection
00:42:13.120
are a priority for him. And so he doesn't do it. And so that's going to be a, if you're at these
00:42:18.760
different life tasks, you're going to have different mentalities. And another transition
00:42:23.940
is between the generative state, which is usually when you're in your sixties or your seventies,
00:42:28.580
and you're not really driven by status as much. You just want to contribute. But then there's the
00:42:34.800
next stage, which is the final stage of life, which Eric Erickson, the psychologist said is about
00:42:39.800
integrity or despair. And that final phase is when you piece together what your life meant,
00:42:46.500
can you look back on it with relatively few regrets, understanding how you affected the world. And if
00:42:51.840
you can do that, you've achieved integrity. Erickson says, and if you can't do that, you achieve
00:42:56.620
despair. And so I'm struck by, especially among seniors, how much they want to learn that you'd think
00:43:03.220
their curiosity would be down, but it's not at all. Seniors really want to learn. I think they want
00:43:07.540
to figure out where they fit into the world and what they can leave behind to the world.
00:43:12.700
So I love about the book, you weave in these big ideas along with these concrete practical things.
00:43:16.480
Let's end with a concrete practical thing. Like what's one thing that you think people can start
00:43:20.280
doing today to become more of this illuminator type? Yeah, I would say one of them would just be like,
00:43:26.300
be a little more aggressive on the next time you're on a train or in a coffee shop, like start a
00:43:30.380
conversation with somebody. And, you know, we underestimate how much we'll enjoy that. We
00:43:36.160
underestimate how much people will want to get deep. And so just be a little more, I have a
00:43:41.500
friend who says, I practice aggressive friendship. Be the person on the train who starts the conversation.
00:43:46.280
And if they cut you off, fine, but the odds are they will love to have this conversation and they'll
00:43:50.920
love to make it fun. Then there are other little practical things. Like one of them is just
00:43:55.240
when thanking a, when writing a thank you note, the temptation is to write about yourself.
00:44:00.380
Here's how I am going to use what you gave me. But the nicer thing is to write about the other
00:44:05.580
person's intentions. Thank you for taking the time to think about who I am and buying me this perfect
00:44:11.420
gift makes me feel seen by you. And so that's the sort of practical thing you can do. And then I will
00:44:18.280
tell parents, if your kid's in school, the most practical thing they can do is major in the humanities,
00:44:25.080
and learn about people. And then the most practical thing you can do is to lead with respect,
00:44:32.360
lead with a sense of, I want to get to know you. And you'll find even in the little encounters at
00:44:38.080
the cash register or the big encounters with family and friends, life is just a little happier.
00:44:43.400
I love that. Well, David, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:44:47.140
Well, they can buy their book from Amazon or wherever they buy their books. They can also,
00:44:52.720
my writing generally appears in the New York Times and in the Atlantic magazine. So if
00:44:58.080
people want to Google me and they can find more writing than is humanly possible.
00:45:03.780
Fantastic. Well, David Brooks, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:45:06.560
Oh, it's always great to talk with you. Thank you for having me on.
00:45:09.900
My guest today was David Brooks. He's the author of the book, How to Know a Person. It's available on
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amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is slash knowaperson,
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where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.
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Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
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artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that
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we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven't done
00:45:39.320
so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on off a podcast or
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Spotify. It helps that a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the
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show with a friend or family member who would think we get something out of it. As always,
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thank you for the continued support. And until next time, it's Brett McKay. Reminding you to
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listen to AOM podcast would put what you've heard into action.